Working together to improve attendance
Guidance to help schools, academy trusts, governing bodies, and local authorities maintain high levels of school attendance including roles and responsibilities
From September 2022, this will replace all previous guidance on school attendance except for statutory guidance for parental responsibility measures. The Secretary of State has committed to it becoming statutory when parliamentary time allows (this will be no sooner than September 2023).
The guidance focusses on managing attendance by:
Preventing patterns of absence from developing by promoting good attendance
Intervening early by using data to spot patterns of absence before they become persistent and working with families to remove the barriers to attendance
Targeting support for persistent and severe absentees with all local partners working together to reengage pupils. The main requirements on local authorities.
What does this mean for local authorities?
Local authorities are expected to:
- Rigorously track local attendance data to devise a strategic approach to attendance
- Make attendance a key focus of all frontline council services.
- Use attendance data from all schools in the area to identify the pupil cohorts, schools, and neighbourhoods/ towns on which to focus efforts.
- All appropriate frontline operational staff in attendance, associated teams and local partners must understand their role in delivering this strategy and working together.
- Have a School Attendance Support Team which provides the following 4 core functions which should not be traded or require service level agreements from schools.
- Communication and advice
- Targeting Support Meetings (minimum of one a term)
- Multi-disciplinary support for families
- Legal intervention
Local authorities can continue to trade other elements of their attendance management and improvement to schools and trusts, for example delivery of school level responsibilities or training for attendance staff.
- Monitor and improve the attendance of children with a social worker through their Virtual School. To build on the progress made by virtual school heads since the expansion of the programme, local authorities are expected to:
- Set aspirational targets for attendance of pupils with a social worker
- Secure the regular attendance of pupils looked-after as their corporate parent
- Provide support and advice to previously looked-after children
- Monitor and improve the attendance of children with a social worker through their Virtual School
To facilitate this, schools are expected to inform a pupil’s social worker if there are unexplained absences from school.
Traded Services
The academy buy back window is currently open and the offer of support has not changed at this point. Warwickshire Attendance Service will continue to have a traded offer to support to improve attendance. This will be an adapted offer to compliment the new requirements and further support schools to improve their attendance.
Data Sharing
The DfE attendance data trial continues and we are being asked to encourage all schools to sign up. Once the trial ends, there will be a requirement to share data using this system. Further details can be found at the following link:
If you are in the process of changing your MIS or have plans to and have any questions, then please contact us. We will arrange a call back to discuss this in more detail from our ICT team.
Webinars for Schools
In order to support the transition to the new ways of working, the DfE is holding a series of webinars.
Webinar theme
16 June 2022 (16:00-17:00)
23 June 2022 (16:00-17:00)
30 June 2022 (16:00-17:00)
TBC
- Effective governance to appropriately challenge leaders on attendance.
Previous Webinars can be found at the following Link:
‘Working together to improve attendance can be found at the following link.
If you wish to discuss this further, please feel free to contact the Warwickshire Attendance Service.
was@warwickshire.gov.uk